About Granular restore from backup to tape
Disclaimer:
Please ignore any badges next to my name :smileyembarrassed: . My expertise is NetBackup, with very basic BE knowledge.
Our customer is backing up a virtual fileserver (VMware) directly to tape.
Question:
To restore a few individual files, do we need to stage to disk (like with Exchange), or can the files be extracted from tape without staging?
Yes. Staging is required if the backup is on tape. This is because the entire VM is stored on tape, not the individual files. If you restore from tape, you need to allow time for the staging and ensure that there is sufficient free space for the entire VM. Alternatively, you can duplicate the backup set to disk and then restore the files from the disk backup set.
You can backup the VM as if it is a physical machine, but you loose the ability to restore it as a VM. If you need to restore the entire VM, in this case, you need to create a new VM and then proceed to restore to this new VM as if it is a physical machine, whereas if it is backed up as a VM, then you just need to restore it as VM.
- Hi Marianne, It has always worked like this. I think there might have been a product feature request put in during the old Symantec days when this first came out but nothing was done about it. If 1 product in the stack can do it, they should be able to retrofit this along the line for the other. Not to be. So you need as much disk space available for staging as your largest VM. Otherwise get them to buy cheaper iSCSI disk and attach this way. It will work very well if paired with 10GbE network cards. Cheers, and keep well, Craig